Ok so I've been programming in PHP for several years now. I always enjoyed building content systems from the ground-up for practice (forums, blogs, comics, general CMSs etc), however in the past few months I have come to the conclusion I am focusing too much time in doing redundant work like building the base content system every time - fetching information from databases, making the basic layout actually work before bringing any valuable content management to it, etc. Now, im aware of development frameworks such as Zend, CakePHP, etc; but I've always failed to work with them to my satisfaction, and seemed to give up on them rather quickly.
So my questions are:
- How customizable are those frameworks? Can I really get full freedom with them once I learn to use them properly and get to work on actual features instead of wasting weeks on getting a simple base ground up and running?
- How much can I write my own functions for doing stuff in the background?
- Are the results usually fast? Or do the frameworks provide slow and heavy code?
- How intuitive is it to really get them working in my favor and how easy is it to get past the basics nd working with what's really important?
I'd love any insights in this subject. Also I'd love to know if any of you have any preferred frameworks to work with. Thanks in advance!